Melanie Uth

Biographic Data

ID2183177
NAMEMelanie Uth
GIVEN NAMESMelanie
FAMILY NAMEUth
SIGNATUREUTH M
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Cologne
ORCID0000-0002-0060-9356
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS2
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2016
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX1

  • Labialización de las nasales finales: Estudio comparativo en tres regiones de español americano

    Open AccessMelanie Uth, Élodie Blestel et al.ARTICLEForma y Función2024

    Comparamos la labialización no asimiladora de nasales finales en español en tres corpus de español americano (mexicano, colombiano y paraguayo). Si bien es conocida la labialización no asimiladora en español yucateco, es en gran parte desconocida en otras regiones de habla hispana, por lo que a menudo se atribuye a la influencia maya. Ahora bien, se han señalado casualmente hábitos de pronunciación similares tanto en Paraguay como en Colombia. Co…

  • On the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya

    Open AccessMelanie Uth, Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo et al.ARTICLEFrontiers in Language Sciences2024

    In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our cor…

  • The Production of Post-Lexical Prosodic Prominence in Yucatec Maya and its Perception by Speakers of Yucatecan Spanish

    Jan Fliessbach, Nuria Martínez García et al.ARTICLEInternational Journal of American…2024References: 17

    Previous literature on Yucatec Maya (YM) locates the most prominent constituent of an utterance at the beginning of the Intonational Phrase (IP) that contains the predicate. Similar results have been reported for Yucatecan Spanish (YS). However, since constituents vary in syllabic makeup, the exact position of prominence cues in YM remains to be determined. We present results from a production and a perception experiment. In our production experi…

  • Labialization of Word-Final Nasals in Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya: Language Contact, Prosodic Prominence Marking, and Local Identity

    Open AccessMelanie UthARTICLEJournal of Language Contact2022References: 2

    This paper provides a comparative analysis of word-final nasals in Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya based on speech data from Quintana Roo (Mexico). In Yucatecan Spanish, a nasal is often pronounced as [m] if placed at the end of a word (e.g., Yucatá [m] instead of Yucatá [n]). Since this phenomenon is widespread on the Yucatán Peninsula, but largely unknown in other Spanish-speaking regions, it is often linked to the influence of the indigenou…

  • Circumflex Nuclear Configurations in Yucatecan Spanish as a Supraregional Feature: The Roles of Bilingualism and Gender

    Open AccessMelanie Uth, Nuria Martínez GarcíaARTICLELanguage and Speech2022Cited by: 1References: 34

    In this paper, we study the nuclear configurations of declarative broad focus utterances in Yucatecan Spanish, a Mexican variety spoken in southeast Mexico in contact with Yucatec Maya, from a sociolinguistic perspective. We draw on a corpus of 276 utterances elicited from 16 speakers, eight Maya–Spanish bilinguals (four female/four male) and eight Spanish monolinguals (four female/four male). We particularly concentrate on the roles of bilingual…

  • Variation of Relative Complementizers in Yucatecan Spanish: A Comparison of Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers

    Open AccessPatrick Auhagen, Melanie UthARTICLELanguages2022References: 9

    The starting point of this article is the occurrence of determiner-less and bare que relative complementizers like (en) que, ‘(in) that’, instead of (en) el que, ‘(in) which’, in Yucatecan Spanish (southeast Mexico). While reference grammars treat complementizers with a determiner as the standard option, previous diachronic research has shown that determiner-less complementizers actually predate relative complementizers with a determiner. Additio…

  • Language Contact and Intonation: Evidence from Contrastive Focus Marking and Loanwords in Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya

    Melanie Uth, Rodrigo Gutiérrez-BravoARTICLEBulletin of Hispanic Studies2020

    This paper investigates the language contact between Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya (Mayan) in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, at the level of the intonational realization of contrastive focus, and by means of the prosody of Spanish loanwords in Yucatec Maya. In Yucatec Maya, the maximally prominent constituent of an utterance is generally located at the leftmost part of the Intonational Phrase that contains the predicate (Verhoeven & Skopetea…

  • Traces of language contact in intonation: The case of Yucatecan Spanish

    Open AccessMelanie UthARTICLESpanish in Context2019

    This article deals with the intonational realization of contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish. Data from three recent elicitation studies with a total of ten bilingual speakers of Yucatecan Spanish (YS) and Yucatec Maya (YM) and five monolingual speakers of YS suggest that contrastive focus in the Yucatecan Spanish variant spoken by the Spanish-dominant and monolingual speakers is mostly signaled by means of a high pitch early in the intonation …

  • Lack of Syllable Duration as a Post-Lexical Acoustic Cue in Spanish in Contact with Maya

    Open AccessNuria Martínez García, Melanie UthARTICLELanguages2019Cited by: 1References: 37

    This paper focuses on the duration of stressed syllables in broad versus contrastive focus in Yucatecan Spanish and examines its connection with Spanish-Maya bilingualism. We examine the claim that phonemic vowel length in one language prevents the use of syllable duration as a post-lexical acoustic cue in another. We study the duration of stressed syllables of nouns in subject and object position in subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences (broad and…

  • The Diachronic Development of French -age between Usage-Related Shifts and Grammatical Change

    Melanie UthARTICLELanguage Dynamics and Change2016

    French -age developed from Latin relational adjectives in -aticus that were by and by nominalized, thereby incorporating the former head noun as a semantic constituent. In this article, it is argued that the Modern French -age derivation originated from the (re-)association of a semantically vacuous formative and an abstract semantic feature. This semantic feature gradually emerged through abstraction from the existing concrete derivatives and, o…